Amazon was, in 1884, one of the first entries to be published in the Oxford English Dictionary. Deriving from the classical languages, it had already acquired, as the dictionary explained, a range of meanings in English. Historical reference led back to the mythical female warriors ‘alleged by Herotodus (among others) to exist in Scythia’, while later extended use had given the general sense ‘female warrior’ – even if this tended, of necessity, to exhibit largely hypothetical or figurative uses in English use. As in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, ‘play[ing] the Amazon’ implied the appropriation of a suitably intransigent demeanour, rather than the decision to bear arms against a common foe.

A further shift of meaning was located in the mid-eighteenth century. An Amazon of this kind was different again, implying, as the dictionary specified, ‘a very tall, strong, or masculine woman’. First illustrated by Samuel Johnson in an 1758 essay in the Idler which in which an amazon rides a thousand miles in less than a thousand hours, thereby winning a wager, the link to war is demonstrably severed in favour of achievements which are distinct from those which conventionally appear in canons of feminine behaviour. That these are also placed outside regulative female norms can, however, be plain.

‘To the man an Amazon never fails to be forbiddding’,

as James Fordyce warned in his Lectures to Young Women:

The amazons of war-time discourse can therefore offer some interesting changes – and continuities — in this respect. An early citation for airwoman in the Words in War-Time Archive, for example, extols the achievements of ‘the Princess Shakovsky, a well-known sportswoman, who holds a flying certificate’ and who had ‘been permitted to join General Ruzsky’s staff as a military airwoman’. Yet conflict remained, prototypically, a man’s business:

The Czar refused permission for the formation of a regiment of Amazons which three hundred society women were desirous to join.

Twentieth-century Amazons also appeared in news discourse in Britain, affirming similar impulses towards action. A lengthy article in the Scotsman in December 1914 focussed, for example, on responses received to the recent questionnaires on enlistment (and eligibility) as sent out by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee. As these made plain, in circumstances where no men were available, a number of women had attempted to volunteer instead. In the Scotsman, ‘the brave and patriotic spirit in which the women of our country are facing the situation’ was duly extolled:

Some women, who, to their sorrow, have no men to send to the firing line, express the wish to go themselves – a fact which suggests the possibility of the formation of an Amazons’ Battalion. “Regret,” writes one, “we have no men in this household. Just wish you would give women a chance’

As the Scotsman added:

The same brave Amazon spirit finds forcible expression in the following offer from a lady not a hundred miles from Glasgow Cross: – “I regret we haven’t a man of any age in this house. If a strong, healthy, and willing woman of uncertain age, past the first flush of youth, would be of any use to you, I’m at your service, without money and without price.

Such offers of active service were politely refused; war, as the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee’s own posters stressed, was an exercise in ‘playing the man’ – in a diction of performance and masculinity from which women were excluded.

By 1916, the diction and framing discourse of the Amazon had nevertheless taken on a new prominence. In a Punch cartoon from early 1916, the Amazon is, for example, now seen as a recognisable type, in vigorous existence throughout the nation. Framed by other stereotypes of war-time identity, such as the slacker and the rumour-monger, the Amazon instead appears, in uniform, striding across the page. Unencumbered by the hobble skirts – or long hair — of the past, she exhibits a sense of freedom and purpose, as well as a determined engagement with the war effort. A timorous new recruit (also female) meanwhile hovers uncertainly to her right, in a distinctly underpowered version of her future self.

Amazons, in war-time discourse, would, in reality, assume a variety of forms. By 1916, a range of erstwhile male roles were, for example, being performed by women as more and more men went to the front (first as volunteers, then via the Derby Scheme, and finally via conscription). As other posts explore, these changes generated their own issues of taxonomy – if clerks were male, was a female clerk a lady clerk, a clerkess, or a girl clerk? Similarly, was a conductress or a conductorette to be preferred? Or a woman- or lady- or girl-conductor? Amazon clearly offered in some respects a useful generic – not least in signalling commitment to active war service on the Home Front (and as opposed to the prototypically domestic service of the past). Railway amazons hence populate the trains, trams, and tube as drivers and conductors rather than passengers; as in the War Budget in March 1917, the ‘Amazonian ranks’ are given as being visibly increased by new roles assumed by women in the pharmaceutical industry or as portresses. Other amazons are located on the land, in hotels, in motor work, in ambulances, or in industry. Munitionettes, too, could equally testify to the Amazonian spirit and its salience in war. As the Scotsman commented, using transparently military diction to describe life in a munitions factory:

The Amazonian column that had passed in files along the central passage of the factory had apaprently formed up in line on reaching the canteen and charged up to the barrier — a long counter held by a garrison of voluntary women workers who had for some time been preparing in expectation of the attack … On the further side, the voluntaries moved briskly about, successfully keeping out of each othere’s way, and trasferring plates of ham, poached eggs, pots of tea, toast, and other edibles appropriate to a high tea, from the cooking range to the counter.

As War Illustrated affirms, the amazon was, in such new incarnations, surely part of a ‘social revolution’ and a significant player in the forging of a ‘new England’:

Neither on this farm, nor on the farm adjoining did I see a man. Girls were doing everything, and doing it splendidly. Homeward bound, skirting the coverts, we paused at a rustic stile at the moment a shapely, gaitered leg swung over it. Another Amazon! This fresh version had a gun over her shoulder. Velveteen breeches, a loose-fitting tunic with deep side-pockets … “My head game-keeper –Miss Smithers’ cried Mr. XXX, in proud introduction.

We might compare the news journalist Michael MacDonagh writing in his diary in 1916:

Women are to be seen at work everywhere. “Men must fight and women must work.” … You see them at the wheel of motor-cars and motor-drays. You see them handling the reins of horse-drawn vehicles. They are ticket-collectors at Underground and tube stations. At hotels and offices the lift-boy has become a lift-girl. The hall-porter at some of the big hotels is an Amazon in blue or mauve coat, gold-braided peaked cap and high top-boots.

If, in the OED, the amazon is depicted as defeminised and ‘other’, the amazons of 1916 and after can present some interesting readings, in which strength and ability are positively constructed (at least in terms of their alignment with the war effort), while — as in the examples above, amazons can also be rendered subjects of the all-too-approving male gaze. As MacDonagh confesses to his diary, the hall porter amazon is ‘a gorgeous figure that fascinates me’. Yet ‘my favourite’, he adds

is the young “conductorette” on trams and buses, in her smart jacket, short skirts to the knees and leather leggings’.

Uniforms, donned as visual symbols of the public and professional identities which were assumed ‘for the duration’, could have disconcerting effects. That war-work, or being a war-worker, did not preclude attractiveness is a recurrent aspect of comment of this kind.

If the peacettesof 1915 evoke a sustained engagement with an anti-war rhetoric (being, in turn, negatively constructed in mainstream news discourse, along with their peace prattle), amazons can therefore appear as their antithesis. They are situated, too, in positive contradistinction to female versions of the slacker and shirker whose abilities are wasted, and whose contributions to the war effort selfishly remain unmade. As in the campaigns for ‘Women’s Right to Serve’ in 1915, which stressed women’s suitability for war service of various kinds, war-time amazons are therefore often framed in diction which suggest their status as metaphorical soldiers, mobilised for the war effort, and who, as volunteers (rather than conscripts) also willingly respond to the nation’s call. An ideological commitment to war is translated into war service in a range of legitimised forms. Altruistic amazons of this kind offer their own forms of self-sacrifice – in which work is constructed as part of war-time duty and properly patriotic endeavour. Meanwhile, by volunteering for active service in industry, transport, or munitions – or, indeed, in new structures such as the Women’s Reserve Ambulance Corps with its formal appropriation of a range of military ranks) women might also, in another well-established collocation of the day, ‘release a man for the front’, in what remained a far more direct engagement with conflict per se.

Being Amazonian occupies therefore an intriguingly conflicted position in war-time Britian. It both evokes and elides direct military participation; if, for the OED, amazons are ‘female warriors’, their fight is, in 1914-18, relocated onto the front lines of the economy, munitions, transport, or food production, or in their work as nurses or ambulance drivers (among a wide range of other roles). Just like men who have volunteered for the Front, women too could gain a range of forms of insignia and visual validation, such that armlets and badges (as well as uniforms) made active service plain. The amazon can therefore be used to express (and affirm) a range of forms of female endeavour, resolve, and duty, while being amazonian can, as contemporary collocations confirm, be a matter of martial spirit and war-like resolve in which readings of ‘otherness’ can often be deliberately suspended — at least ‘for the duration’. Amazons in 1918 would, however, face a very different future, as later posts will explore.

Language is full of apparently incidental words which nevertheless – given the right circumstances – can find themselves freighted with highly topical meaning. Absentee is a case in point. Used in general to indicate the position of ‘(someone) who is absent from (something)’ as well as in special constructions such as absentee landlord, it would, across the World War One, prove an intriguingly mobile word, being diversified in range and connotation, as well as tapping into prominent discourses of participation and their moral (and gendered) coding

Absentee, was, for example, already an established part of military discourse as war began. For a soldier, being an ‘absentee without leave’ (our modern AWOL) was a chargeable offence. ‘Soldier’s Fatal Fall’ heads, for example, what now appears a somewhat suspicious narrative (in 1915) of the apprehending – and subsequent death – of an absentee of precisely this kind:

Worried by the condition of his wife’s health, a private of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Regiment tramped from Salisbury to Birmingham to see her. He was arrested, taken to Portsmouth as an absentee without leave, and ordered detention in barracks. While in the cell he climbed to a high shelf, and refused to descend. When the doctor was called subsequently he fell, fracturing his spine, and died at the military hospital on Thursday as a result of the fall. A verdict of accidental death was returned at the inquest.

‘Absentee from Edinburgh’s Battalion Arrested’, heads a similar article in February 1915, detailing the case of William Lloyd who ‘was yesterday charged as an Army absentee’. In both, the negative sense is all too clear; being an absentee was firmly proscribed. Whether this could, or should, be deemed in WW1 a case of ‘French leave’ — ‘in military contexts … to escape or take flight; to desert, to take absence without leave’, as the OED explains — nevertheless served to raise other issues given the dynamics of language, and language attitudes, in a time of war. Surely this should be termed ‘German leave’, the presiding magistrate on one such case exclaimed:

You must not say “French leave” now. It is too good a name for so discreditable an action. You must call it “German leave.”

As the previous post explores, the early months of 1916 witnessed a number of new stages in recruitment for the armed forces. The Derby scheme represented the last stages of volunteerism, enabling men who had attested to be called up – in another newly pervasive form of words – in groups. As the 1916 booklet When I Join the Ranks explained, “The “calling up” of any Group is effected by means of a general Proclamation, giving one month’s notice, but each individual soldier also receives a notice by post actually summoning him and giving him a fortnight in which to settle his affairs’

There were nevertheless large numbers of men who still remained outside this system – some excluded by age or disability, or by work in spheres which were deemed important enough to secure exemption from active service. Others – at least rhetorically – were often deemed to fall into the domains of shirkers and slackers, words which took on increasingly gendered patterns of meaning between 1914-18. While shirker is, on the surface, gender-neutral, it was, ‘for the duration’, a term freighted with connotations of evading and avoiding military service in ways which pertained only to male spheres of use. Slacker was similar. Both operated as terms of male opprobrium, in narrowly specific senses which pertained to the absence of active participation in the war.

While men might have “failed to come forward”, either as part of the Derby Scheme or in the months and years before its introduction, the question of (non)-participation was, however, to became much more pointed with the introduction of conscription or compulsory service, first announced in the Military Service Bill of January 1916 (though not fully implemented until May). “Compulsion becomes law”, the Daily Express announced on May 26; as of to-day ‘the Military Service act’ would ‘make a soldier of every man, married or unmarried, in Great Britain between the ages of eighteen and forty-one’. While the wider ramifications of this – especially in terms of the refusal to serve, will be considered in later posts — this post will focus on other aspects of evasion and attempted control in the diction of what came to be known as the round-up or rounding-up

Some young men, hearing that a “round-up” was impending, unsuccessfully tried to escape during the progress of the match, and with a number of others were detained for enquiries.

Raid at Newmarket. A Military “Round-Up” on the racecourse. Newmarket racecourse was raided to-day by a strong force of military and police in search of absentees from service. .. The rounding up continued during the day.

The round-up, as a contemporary note from 1916 in the Words in War-Time archive explains, was used to designate “attempts made, by police raids, in places of amusement, in search of men of military age who were shirking service”. Continue reading →

Like the bride-to-be, the diction of the soldier-to-be has an interesting liminality. The bride-to-be is not yet a bride; the promise has been made, but not yet fulfilled. The formal union lies in the future. Nevertheless, if framed by a kind of temporal expectation, events may still not materialise quite as planned. Not all brides-to-be become brides; decisions made earlier might be regretted or revoked. Second thoughts might prevail, while the advertised wedding might not come to pass.

Soldiers-to-be participates in some of this flux of meaning and status, if relocated to a rather different sphere. Here the expected union is that of active service, while ‘to-be’ adroitly picks up the gap between a stated commitment to fight, and its realisation. As in the age-old divide between word and deed by which the true hero is defined, the soldier to-be could occupy an interestingly liminal space.

It appears as yet another lexical item which remains unrecorded in formal lexicography. Picked up in the Words in War-Time archive in early 1916, it appears, for example, in advertising campaigns directed at the ‘Derby Men’ or, on other words, at a specific sub-category of men who had attested under Lord Derby’s scheme, formally the Group Scheme, in the autumn of 1915. The ‘Derby Scheme’ (variously referred in news discourse of the day the Derby crusade or Derby experiment, with various degrees of reservation) aimed to boost enlistment among the millions of eligible men who, as National Registration had shown, remained at home (some, admittedly, in protected forms of employment). Under the ‘Scheme’, one could enlist for immediate service, thereby passing from civilian or civvie to soldier with immediate effect. But, as in the case of soldiers-to-be, one could ‘attest’ and remain at home, bearing only to the obligation to embark on active service once summoned to do so, or ‘called up’.

Seen in terms of language, then, the Derby Scheme yielded a range of interesting forms. Hall’s Wine, the ‘supreme tonic restorative’ which frequently advertised its efficacy for the diverse forms of nerve-strain witnessed as war advanced, would, for example, rapidly seize this opportunity too. While targeted marketing was therefore aimed at soldiers at the Front, a further assault was aimed at the soldier-to-be whose anxiety levels, as the advertising campaigns noted, might well be on the rise. Unlike the enlisting fever or khaki fever attested in earlier comment on the war, soldiers-to-be had hitherto proved resistant to contagion of this kind. Now, however, ‘many and many a man’, as the advertising copy proclaimed, was to be fetched from occupations on the Home front for a set of ‘new and arduous duties’:

The next few months will take many and many a man from desk and office and factory to make of him a soldier. In thousands of cases these workers will be ‘softened’ by their sedentary lives, will indeed be far from fit to tackle their new and arduous duties. In every case Hall’s Wine will be found most helpful

Addressed directly to the ‘soldier-to-be’, advertising of this kind neatly exploited the linguistic and military limbo of this section of the Derby Scheme. As it stressed, ‘workers’ will be made into ‘soldiers’, while the ‘sedentary’ must be made ‘fit to tackle’ war. Continue reading →

‘I am still in the pink. Terribly dirty, but as happy as a kid with mud. Still in the same place. Awful slaughter. Two more of our men were wounded last night by a shell. One had three fingers blown clean off’.

This letter was reproduced in the Evening News in October 1914 from where, carefully clipped out (and with in the pink underlined), it made its way into the Words in War-Time archive. Originally written by Corporal Bert —- [the surname is elided], it reassured his family in Walthamstow of his continued good health at the Front.

Royal Library of Belgium; Free Access-Rights Reserved.

Moving from private to public domains, the letter hence participated in the contemporary recording of war (newspapers such as the Evening News regularly sought out first-hand testimony of this kind, offering, too, the promise of monetary reward).

Seen in term of the archive, however, it was to participate in living history of a different kind. In these terms, in the pink signalled a phrase which was, as yet, unattested in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (the section dealing with words in the range Ph-Piper had been published eight years earlier, appearing in June 1906). It would, in fact, emerge as one of the most characteristic idioms of war-time discourse, constituting a familiar item in letters to and from the Front, as well as being appropriated into a range of other domains. Continue reading →

To recruit, as the Oxford English Dictionary confirms, has long been in use in English. The first evidence of its military sense occurs in 1655; the corresponding noun was recorded from 1626. Yet, as Clark’s notebooks confirm, the early weeks of war quickly brought other aspects of use into play. Here, too, Clark’s interest in ephemera of all kinds again clearly worked to good effect. Gathering up evidence of lexical and material culture alike, he quickly sent a set of recruiting posters for safe storage to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Meanwhile, in his notebooks, he commented on recruiting poster as a noun, finding only silence when he tried to look it up in the OED as it then existed.**

In the context of WW1, a recruiting poster was, Clark explained, a printed bill which invited recruits to join the army, He provided a clipping from the Daily Express on August 29th 1914 in careful illustration. The language of recruiting, as Clark’s first notebook records, would in fact neatly mirror the highly public pressure to join up, and ‘do one’s bit’. As the Scotsman reported on Saturday 5th September 1914, Edinburgh had recently witnessed both recruiting marches and recruiting parades. For Clark these confirmed two new combinations which also remained – and remain – absent from the OED, Continue reading →

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About the Author

Lynda Mugglestone is Professor of the History of English at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford. She has published widely on the history of the English, and on the social, cultural, and ideological issues that words and dictionary-making can reveal. Recent books include Lost for Words. The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary (2005) ‘Talking Proper’. The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol (2007), Dictionaries. A Very Short Introduction (2011), The Oxford History of English (updated edition, 2012) and, together with Freya Johnston, Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum (2012). She is currently finishing a book on eighteenth-century language and Samuel Johnson, and plans to spend the next four years working on Clark.